News 9/20/23

Top News

Oracle announces “the new Oracle Health EHR platform” at its annual conference, which it says will use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to offer a modern interface and intuitive processes.

The company says some of the announced new Millennium capabilities will be released in the next 12 months.

Oracle also announced Clinical Digital Assistant, which allows providers and patients to interact with its EHR solutions via voice commands.

Reader Comments

From Tech Bro: “Re: Bill Gurley’s comments about Epic. I have seen nothing indicating that CEO Judy Faulkner was a big Obama donor or that her donations landed her a spot on the Health IT Policy Committee.” Neither have I. Online contribution records show that she donated a couple of thousand dollars to the Obama campaign in 2008, but the big numbers that Gurley hinted at were the total donations of Epic’s employees and even those amounts were modest. Also notably incorrect in Gurley’s presentation:

• Meaningful Use did not require doctors to buy software to earn payouts – they could “meaningfully use” the EHRs they already owned. Those who bought EHRs to cash in on MU weren’t buying Epic. All hospital EHRs were certified, so no Epic demand was created by federal action.
• His assumption that ONC “took Epic’s feature set and plowed it into this spreadsheet” to create certification criteria is silly in many ways.
• The EHR vendor fines that he listed weren’t levied because their products failed to meet ONC’s certification criteria, but rather for for falsifying EHR certification test results and paying kickbacks (EClinicalWorks and Greenway Health) and taking drug company kickbacks to use the EHR to push opiate prescribing (Practice Fusion).
• President Obama did not say in an interview with Ezra Klein that creating a barrier to entry for EHRs was his biggest Affordable Care Act disappointment. He expressed regret before leaving office in 2017 that paying MU incentives still left a lot of paper records, indecipherable patient bills, and excessive data entry time for clinicians and also created interoperability challenges with the many EHRs that were being used. He also noted that providers are incented to hoard data.
• The groundwork for HITECH was put in place by Republican President Bush, who also created ONC. ARRA and HITECH were signed four weeks after President Obama took office, a full year before ACA was passed, so the suggestion that HITECH was part of ACA is incorrect.

From Code Spewer: “Re: code generators. Most of us long-timers remember the bust of CASE tools in healthcare years ago.” The empty suits who ran the crappy vendor I worked for many years ago latched onto CASE tools as a competitive imperative, as whispered into their ears by bored techies who craved resume-enhancing experience. They eventually realized that you can’t just feed an old application’s code into a generator and have it create readable, technically efficient code that can be maintained and enhanced ongoing. They also eventually figured out that competitive advantage rarely springs from technology (despite what technology bigots claim) but rather functionality that requires subject matter expertise to design.

From Biliary Duck: “Re: cloud. Some of these companies will regret betting their future on the billing benevolence of cloud providers, who are free to increase fees any time their investors need a thrill.” Health IT vendors have historically regretted making third party software and services a key part of their products. You don’t really want outside companies having outsized influence over your pricing, technology strategy, and relationship with your customers. Cloud is great for quickly scaling up and adjusting for required performance with low capital expense, but you’re trusting cloud vendors to avoid turning the financial screws after you let them become critical to your business. The same goes for outsourcing.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Lorre thought that maybe one or two companies would take her up on the new-sponsor offer of getting the rest of 2023 free, but since four or five signed up quickly, she has decided to extend the deal beyond my initial limit of three companies. Everybody can get 25% off produced webinars as well, which generate ongoing views on our YouTube webinar channel. Spend little more than the cost of buying coffee for HIMSS booth staffers and you’ll enjoy a year-plus connection with HIStalk’s loyal readership of industry decision-makers plus the bonus of chatting with Lorre, to whom I wisely deflect calls since my single talent is analyzing and writing, not persuasively describing those offerings that make it possible.

Webinars

September 21 (Thursday) 2 ET. “Unlock open enrollment best practices to stop future denials.” Sponsor: Waystar. Presenter: Lauren Tungate, solution strategist team lead, Waystar. Nearly half of insured Americans consider changing their insurance coverage each fall, necessitating provider safeguards to stop increased denials, find hidden coverage, and prevent uncompensated care. This webinar will crack open enrollment best practices, such as using different data sources to get an accurate picture of benefit details; leveraging automation to identify hidden coverage, confirm active insurance, and avoid lost revenue; and simplifying eligibility workflows to reduce the financial burden on patients and strain on staff.

October 25 (Wednesday) 2 ET. “Live Ask Me Anything Webinar: The Power of Data Completeness.” Sponsor: Particle Health. Presenters: Jason Prestinario, MSME, CEO, Particle Health; Carolyn Ward, MD, director of clinical strategy, Particle Health. Is fragmented data impacting your organization and its ability to scale quickly? Our experts will discuss the advantage of having a 360-degree, real-time view of your patients. Access to analytic-ready data supports proactive care by enabling rapid clinical decision-making, stratifying high-risk patients, developing and using personalized treatment plans, lowering cost, and quickly closing care gaps.

Previous webinars are on our YouTube channel. Contact Lorre to present or promote your own.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Virtual patient observation and analytics company MedSitter rebrands to Collette Health. The company has also added new AI presence-detection capabilities to its virtual care solutions.

Summus, which offers virtual access to specialty consults, raises $19.5 million.

Telemedicine services company Avel ECare acquires Fident Health, a virtual hospitalist business based in Texas.

Veradigm reports that it is taking longer than anticipated to correct accounting errors that have led to de-listing warnings from Nasdaq, and will thus file yearly and quarterly reports later than expected. The company, which plans to ask a Nasdaq Hearings Panel for an extended file request, has revised its 2023 revenue impact from $40 million down to $20 million.

Amazon is reportedly planning a rapid rollout of healthcare-related subscription services and offering discounts on its One Medical primary care services to Prime members

Sales

• HCA Healthcare selects remote patient monitoring services from Nudj Health.
• Bryan Health (NE) will use KeyCare’s  Epic-based network of virtual care providers.
• UAE-based, publicly traded healthcare operator Burjeel Holdings signs a $34 million contract to implement Oracle Health’s EHR running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• Emirates Health Services will implement Care.ai.

People

Chad Hendricks (Medecision) joins UpHealth as VP of business development.

Deloitte hires Michael Cleary (Workday) as VP/sales executive.

Direct Recruiters promotes healthcare IT and life sciences team members Rebecca Forristall and Ben Shamis to partners.

Drew Narayan, MS, MBA (PeriGen) joins Swift Medical as SVP of sales and marketing.

Announcements and Implementations

Excelsior Springs Hospital (MO) goes live on Oracle Health.

Tampa General Hospital (FL) implements Andor Health’s ThinkAndor Virtual Hospital technology within its ICU.

A new KLAS report on virtual sitting and nursing talks up AvaSure as an established vendor of solutions that are being used by large organizations going back five years, with a total hospital count of 1,100. Customers of the newly renamed Collette Health like the system for virtual sitting, but would like to see higher video resolution and better EHR integration. Care.ai was the only vendor in which all surveyed customers are using the solution for virtual nursing. All respondents say the product they use is part of their long-term plans.

Sponsor Updates

• Total Health Care (MD) significantly reduces its patient no-show rate by implementing the EClinicalWorks Healow no-show prediction AI model.
• Emirates Health Services will implement Care.ai’s virtual nursing and Smart Care Facility solutions.
• AGS Health will exhibit at HFMA 2023 Biennial Tri-State Conference September 20-22 in Florence, IN.
• Availity sponsors the American Heart Association’s 30^th annual First Coast Heart Walk in Jacksonville, FL.
• Biofourmis releases its expanded Digital Clinical Trials solutions with its platform for biopharma and other life sciences companies.
• CHIME releases a new episode of its Leader 2 Leader Podcast, “The Importance of Cybersecurity Policy Changes and Leadership Buy-In.”
• Clearsense publishes a new case study, “Higher Physician Efficiency and Lower Costs to Patients.”
• Clearwater CFO Baxter Lee joins the Tennessee HIMSS Board of Directors.
• HIStalk sponsors participating in Meditech Live, September 20-22 in Foxborough, MA, include Access, CereCore, CloudWave, First Databank, Nuance, and CHIME.

Blog Posts

• How to Stop Revenue Leaks with Meditech Automated Financial Testing (CereCore)
• Why wouldn’t you take on fully delegated risk? (Arcadia)
• 9 Ways to Go Beyond Basic Texting and Deliver Better Conversations (Artera)
• Meet the Clinician – Kenneth Catoe (Ascom)
• Five Risks of Not Improving Clinical Data Quality (Availity)
• Are Wearables Worth the Investment? 3 Critical Areas Where They’re Proving Their Worth (Bardavon)
• Cloud Risk is Different Than Traditional IT Risk – Here’s What to Do About It (Clearwater)
• Understanding How Prescribers Use Their EHR in Administrative Workflow and Patient-Visit Workflow (ConnectiveRx)

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
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